General Computer Stuff

Understanding the Render Pipeline

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This isn’t a Second Life specific article, but SL is all about getting our world rendered and concepts are similar in all rendered worlds. Arton Rotaru found the blog page and posted a link in the SL Forum. So, if your are curious and wonder how hard can it be to render a world? Then this is something for you.

Lost-Eden_003
Lost Eden 2014

Also, if you are a creative type and hopping to optimize your builds to reduce lag, there are concepts you will likely find interesting.

See: Render Hell 1.0 – For discussion see the SL Forum: A lovely explanation of how a Render Pipeline works.

On the blog the top video is just the author’s explanation of what is come and why he made the page.

The rest of the page is an illustrated text. Some illustrations are pictures. Others are short animations or videos.

 

Oculus Rift DK2

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The DK2 (Developer’s Kit) is shipping and people are making videos of their experience with it. The increased resolution has them excited, as if it were possible to create more excitement than the DK1 did.

[youtube TdkVkKsAqOM]

The motion tracking is impressing. Being able to move forward and backward, leaning rather than moving, is apparently an impressive change adding to the sense of presence. Technolust is a virtual world/game demo that is revealing the color and presence that the OR delivers.

All is not perfect with the DK2. The motion tracking camera has limits and it is reported that when you reach the end of its field of vision the motion tracking stops, which reviewers found disconcerting.

There are still some visual artifacts and motion blurring here and there. But, the DK2 seems to be a big step forward.

Road to VR has numerous links to different ‘un-boxing’ videos and initial tests and reviews.

Internet News 2014-27

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Every so often I pass along news about the Internet. Mostly US centric. This summer lots of things are stacking up that are mostly never mentioned in the mainstream media.

Stop Drama w/Dramamine

[youtube 2hEUbezqd88]

Facebook Guinea Pigs

This week news broke that Facebook experimented on 700,000 of their users without their knowledge. The idea was to see of ‘mood’  is contagious in the digital world. To do that they added either more positive news or negative news to the test subjects’ feed. So, you aren’t just seeing an unedited feed at FB. It can be manipulated. 

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Adobe CC 2014 Released

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Today Adobe released an update of their Creative Suite of graphics tools. I never expected to see a large update like this since the start of creative cloud and subscriptions. But, I was wrong there is a new one out.

If you have a product subscription and your Creative Cloud app is not showing the various CC packages with ‘(2014)’ appended, you need to log out of the CC app. The log out is in Preferences_>Account (tab). When you log back in, the new apps will appear.

My downloads this morning were very slow. In addition my computer was slow while the process was ongoing. So, you may want to wait to start your update until late this evening. 

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Feedly Down

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Today Feedly, a news aggregator, is down. That means I am out of touch with the world. Here is their announcement:

Denial of service attack

Posted on  by 

2:04am PST – Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.

We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.

We will update this blog post as soon as we have more information:

Thank you for your understanding,

/Edwin and Seb

The time shown in the post cannot be right. That is probably a time zone error in a server setting.

Oculus Rumors 2014-22

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Engadget originally reported that Samsung was racing with Oculus Rift to market a gaming VR headset first. Now the rumor has shifted. Samsung wants Oculus tech for media display not gaming and is apparently willing to give Oculus first priority on their high-definition display screens.

This seems to make lots of sense as Oculus was/is having a problem getting parts. Enough so that they delayed the release of the Oculus Rift DK2.

For more details see Road to VR: News Bits: Samsung Partners with Oculus on New ‘Media Focussed’ VR Headset?